


Gummy Worm

by softestrichie



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: 1980s, Ableism, Alternate Universe - High School, Autistic Richie Tozier, Bullying, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Not Canon Compliant, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pining, Slow Burn, Summer Vacation, the losers are making a horror film!!!!!!!!!!, very very loosely inspired by the movie super 8
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:41:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23877088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softestrichie/pseuds/softestrichie
Summary: Richie never thought himself so totally cut out for the movies; when Bill asks him to work all the practical effects for his latest, goriest super 8, his heart is tested for the first time this summer. The second time comes when Bill asks Eddie Kaspbrak too. The third when he falls in love with the same boy twice.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 18





	1. Cheetah

**Author's Note:**

> JUST A DISCLAIMER YOU MAY RECOGNISE THIS FIC!!!!!!!! i posted like a quarter of this first chapter back in november last year but then my school schedule went crazy out of nowhere and i deleted it cuz i felt super bad with it sitting there never updated. i promise it is here for good this time :D also trigger warning for homophobic bullying and reference to ableist attitudes

Richie’s nose is running a little bit as Eddie Kaspbrak slings himself, tummy-first, across his lap for the pole of his boom. The June of 1989 is proving itself hot and thick and slow enough to have him out of the house in gym shorts, today, broken ones with a marker-pen dinosaur drawing smudged over the hip. His shins are covered in pimples and stinging nettle burns and, just now, Eddie Kaspbrak’s clean, striped cotton torso. Everything smells like mothballs and fruit salad for half a second; smells strong enough for Bill Denbrough’s, “aye, Rich, you wonder why nothing gets done around here!” to go completely unheard. 

Richie looks up, neck flushing as Eddie follows suit from his kitty-cat position - “I - what?” Comes his voice, which sounds like it’s shark-deep underwater. Bill flutters an open script, one only half-finished but still packed up nicely in one of his mom’s vinyl folders, under that runny nose like an angry goose. 

“Scene four, shit-brain. Been waiting on that severed hand for twenty m-minutes.” 

This is how things are, through Richie’s summer of sixteen years old, this is life’s very achy little structure all as simple as the sun’s rise and fall. His bum in the gravel of the employees’ parking lot behind the arcade, empty soda cups and broken glass and all, Bill’s all-improved, all-time-consuming new script in his face; Bev tickling Stan on the nose with her feather boa or faux fur shawl or whatever costume Maggie Tozier’s chest of drawers bore them that morning. Ben rehearsing shoddy lines with his eyes lemon-sucking crinkled and Mike giggling at the latter. Richie never thought himself cut out for the movies, even ones all rushed and written up in a Pepsi-fuelled, midnight frenzy like Bill Denbrough’s, but that is precisely where the summer of sixteen years old takes him. That, and perpetually ‘round the width of Eddie Kaspbrak’s little finger. That and Heaven.

It all started about a week ago - the movie part and the Eddie part, too, proposed through the little gaps where Richie’s hair, all over his forehead in a moody heap against the library table, twisted out around his ears. “A horror picture,” Mike had been reading aloud, pushing Bill’s thumb back off of that all-shit-eating script’s very first draft. He’d slipped it into the back-cover of his math workbook as not to raise any librarian eyebrows. “What, like, people just getting really hurt for a coupla hours?”

“Like torture porn,” had come Stan’s little affirmation from behind Mike’s elbow. Always sandwiched up close and looking ever so slightly uncomfortable about it, those two were - somewhere between Siamese twins and an old married couple. Could only just see the curve of Stan’s nose over Mike’s neon-green, linen sleeve. “You know, Hockstetter-style. It’s really hardcore.”

Bill gave them an exhausted look. “Are you duh-d- _dense_?! You never saw a horror picture before? It’s like...like, super deep. All about s-symbols and dark stuff but it’s shown in a way that everyone can understand and be excited by. It’s a life lesson with loads of fake blood and g-ghosts and stuff. Richie knows it, dontcha?”

Richie shoved a grazed knuckle under his chin to prop himself, a big, flower-shaped blotch of rosacea coming out through his hair like a clearing in a woodland. Today had been a bad day - the day he found out, as expected, he had abysmally failed gym class, his least favourite of all the classes, and thus would be receiving another hearty dose of it for the next two months. Eddie Kaspbrak was in his gym class, come to think of it - all banana-yellow socks pulled up ‘round freckly shins and top marks for running faster than a cheetah. Sometimes when he’d run _really_ fast his tee shirt’d flutter like a sail, and you could see his belly-button, neat and round as a seaside gob-stopper. That was the most of him Richie had so far gotten, though; he didn’t ever pair with Eddie and didn’t change with him or the rest of the boys either. Did that by himself in a bathroom stall and, while he did, dreamed about what Eddie Kaspbrak’s hands might smell like.

He’d known it was mothballs and fruit salad a little while before that, maybe when he was about eleven years old instead of sixteen, and he’d known that they were always a little bit hot and clammy. They were nextdoor neighbours - Richie had a square-shaped trampoline and sprinklers and Eddie had a lot of pent up energy. Always was a little cheetah, always was five hundred miles ahead. They’d bounce up and down on their knees and trade Garbage Pail Kids. Only once eleven turned to twelve, and there were no cards left to trade, that cheetah had gotten _beautiful_ , and Richie had gotten nothing but several new rashes on his stomach and an overbite, and the universe had naturally sent them bobbing down two different streams. It hadn’t been Eddie’s fault; only the stars’, only their unwritten laws that boys like Richie Tozier should be so stubbornly lonely and awkward. And so he’d forgotten how Eddie’s hands had smelled. 

That was, until Richie was only halfway through his moody but smiley little, “yeah, horror pictures are pretty c-” and Bill was pulling out another sheet of paper, a proud, purple-penned checklist this time, and he was announcing far too loud that, “Eddie Kaspbrak said he’d do the s-sound stuff. He likes sound stuff.” 

Richie’s hair poured straight back into his face. 

Stan nodded indifferently, still flipping through Bill’s pages with his lips turned up like a rosebud - his analysis pose - while Mike gave a little smile, both of which Richie struggled to see through the sort of glaze fast building up over his eyes. Everything going sticky and foggy like pictures from a heatwave, like plates through dirty dishwater. “Oh, Eddie’s cool - really cool. Didn’t figure him for torture porn,” those maddeningly calm, smiley lips said, but the last part was only teasing at this point; he was coming around. This was really happening. “Take a few weeks to start?”

Bill shook his head, exasperated but relieved, and said, “just one,” as if this wasn’t going to send Richie into an absolute meltdown. As if seven hot days to prepare yourself for Eddie Kaspbrak, in all his freckly, strong-legged glory, could ever come close to being enough. Richie’s grin grew a painful sort of wide behind his hair, fingernails working at a mismatched purple button on his shirt as the wave of moderately interested, giggly consent passed through the gang of them. And when it came to his own little ‘yeah, alright’ moment, his duck-squawk voice found itself so loud and forced and weird it was enough to get them removed from the library altogether: a wobbly thumbs-up above his head, a crinkly-nosed smile and a,

“Sure, I’ll go for it! Fan-tabbie- _tastic_!”

It feels as though Richie’s been wearing that strained, funny grin on his face the whole time up to this point, with Eddie Kaspbrak crawling over the shakiest half of him for a microphone and staring at him with all the light of Heaven in his eyes, feels like he’s even been wearing it in his sleep. Springs up bigger than ever just now, as he shoves the curly straw of his arcade Pepsi in his mouth and passes Bill that wonky severed hand of his. 

That’s his role in the Losers’ Hollywood crew extravaganza - special FX, making people look all horror-fied, throwing fake blood all over the place like a flower girl on the aisle. Privately, Richie Tozier always had a very special place in his heart for movie-stars; Audrey Hepburn, that’s who he’d be in his bedroom at ten years old. Pearls and pouty lips and a nice, velvety voice that could talk to Eddie Kaspbrak with starry-eyed ease. His dad would come walking through the middle of it to call him down to dinner and Richie, mid truly-truly-grateful-and-terribly-happy, would hiss and vow to put a sign on his door. But again - he will never, really be cut out for this. His hair has gone stickier than ever in the midday heat, puffing all wiry and wet ‘round his ears like pigtails, and his shirt has a little bit of ketchup over the bellybutton; even his momma’s heels couldn’t fix him now. He’s not really even all that good at the FX stuff either - the severed hand is a pink-painted leather glove stuffed with cornflower - but Richie is trying to make more pride in teeny tiny victories. He’s trying to deal with _just pretty good_ for now. He gives Bill’s outstretched, still attached hand a little high five with it.

“Pretty sweet, ‘uh? Bev’s hand isn’t, like, that colour at all, but I’m sure if it flies off quick nobody’ll notice,” he chirps. “Quick makes it scarier anyways.”

“It’s all about the sound, actually,” quips the cheetah now finally, thankfully pulling himself out of Richie’s lap. Now that their faces are level, it’s easier to see that Eddie’s cheeks have gone ever so slightly sunburned. Usually just goes the colour of salty peanuts but, alas, this summer is crueler than any other. Richie’s nose runs thick as egg. “If the sound’s really gross and realistic...that’s what makes an audience scared. Right, Bill?” 

The very clearly mystified nod this earns from Bill only seems to make Eddie much more sure of this; his eyes glow more cat-like than ever, and he ruches his cheek up on his shoulder, and he looks at Richie, pleased with himself, in a way so familiar it almost makes him shake. More familiar, more scary, than Richie’s ever been looked at in his life. 

That’s how it’d felt from the moment Eddie came trotting across the gravel in his track shoes this morning: oh-so scarily familiar. About roughly eight hours before this, laying on his stomach in the dark of his room and chewing on his pillowcase, the horrifyingly awkward knowledge that he and Eddie were still very much nextdoor neighbours, and would be starting their journey to meet the rest of the Losers at very much the same time of 2pm, had hit him with a groan. Richie had been trying for one hundred and sixty eight long, pink-cheeked hours to try and think of what he might say to anyone even within the same ballpark as Eddie Kaspbrak, what he might say to prove himself as totally at ease with all of this as his friends. What he might say to him alone was an entirely different breed of difficult. So he’d headed off for 1pm, instead, a little bit wobbly on his bike; ears gawking out under the purple tails of his glasses, breeze leaving all kinds of little bruisey patches on his cheeks. Half an hour and two games of Pac-Man and the latter still hadn’t gone down, and that was when Eddie Kaspbrak, still stubbornly early, had appeared. 

The sunshine through the thick, dusty doors of the Capitol lit the backs of his ears up peach; _Oh Diane_ was playing. Richie could have cried. 

Eddie had settled himself and the skateboard under his arm at the curve of the machine, placing his hand flat over one of the buttons with interest, looking at Richie with a shy grin and telling him, “I don’t remember you really being much of an early-bird or anything, Richie,” with his head turned down. This was where the familiarity started creeping in, you see - that funny little manner of his. Half timid, embarrassed, half electric. Covered his mouth when he giggled but smacked you ‘round the cheeks with those same fingers a second later, held your own tight and strong, tickled you blind. A force of nature. 

“Your house, when I walked past it...it was kinda fucked up. Yellow stuff everywhere.”

Oh, crap. Eggs. “It’s bird poop.”

“Right...well, nice.” 

Richie stooped, knees cracking loudly, to follow Eddie’s line of vision down where it fell around the carpet, pushing his own hair out of his eyes. This was the closest they had been in maybe about three or four years. Not physically - they pass each other at the bus stop and again when they’re onboard to choose their seats, in the corridors, queuing at the water fountain. Eddie had even sat with them one absolutely bone-crushing lunchtime, talking Stan’s ear off about something sporty while stealing Mike’s fries, half-smiling at Richie. This couldn’t have been more different. The two of them all curved into each other like clumsy swans while Richie puffed out a, “s’the place to be, my house. Sound stuff?” and eleven years old never felt so nearby. 

Eddie raised his gaze a little bit. The screen-light was turning his face green. “Huh?”

“Sound stuff. Bill said you’re wicked good at sound stuff, you know, like for the movie. I told him that sounded pretty dorky of you.”

And that’s where the electricity came; where Eddie bristled like a hedgehog, a comparison that made Richie’s belly zigzag under his shirt, and drew his hands up like pincers, landing in a little shove over Richie’s shoulders. Midway through darting between Pacman’s glowing, block-built eyes and Eddie’s brown ones, they make their first real dash of eye-contact in years. Same as it always was, but that didn’t make it easier. If anything it makes it so much harder. “The sound is about as not-dorky as it gets, actually, asshole,” Eddie hisses over the blood in Richie’s ears. “The most technical of all, gotta have real skill for it, not just throw yourself about with a gallon of fake blood like a fuckin’ baby. I was the only person in our grade fit for the job, so…”

Richie let the silence hang for a couple more seconds, fingers nursing over his own shoulder, before the rattle of bike locks was drifting in through that Capitol glass and the eye contact was broken from Eddie whipping his head around. Even the back of it was nice, though, luckily for Riche; longer back there, streaked kind of ashy at the very thinnest, tip-toppest strands. All of Eddie had always been nice.

His cheeks are the nicest, Richie decides, watching him squish them up against his arms just now as he finally takes hold of that boom - courtesy of the incredibly wary Derry High School film & performings arts’ department’s loan that Beverly had managed to score for them. She actually does drama class, and is actually good at talking to grownups, and so the deal had been sealed. She’s smiling at Richie from her fur-clad, blood-spattered position up front, big goofy teeth winking at him in an oddly sort of knowing way; gives that cornflour hand a little wiggle. “When we finish the whole hand-chopping thing I figured we could take a break? Like, go to the diner or somethin’?” Bev says. 

Mike sits himself down against the bricks, pulling his jacket off and making to tie it ‘round his hips as Bill grumbles something about mindfulness, focusing on the here and now. “Nah, best just going home, my place if you want. Meant to be a grizzly bear on the loose,” he drawls, finally drawing Ben out of his script with a shocked little look.

“What, like, genuinely?”

Mike nods. It’s at this point that Eddie’s stood up, pointing his boom up high towards the sky and unsticking his shorts from his legs - Irish green ones, cotton or something else soft rather than that sporty stuff he usually wears. Richie’s eyes go bleary following him. Oh god - he’s nibbling on his lip a little bit with concentration, up there, his chin is shaking. “Yeah, that’s what all the kids in town saw at the weekend. Just strolling right past the ice cream parlour growling and stuff.”

“I can’t really picture that being true,” comes Stan’s contribution, itching at where his curls are going a bit sweaty and flopping down next to Richie, who passes him his discarded jacket to make a little seat out of with a jerky flourish. Bev makes to follow him until Bill, trying to focus his dad’s camcorder, makes a groaning noise. “Would be totally sectioned off or something like that. The police would have it captured.”

“That’s the thing. The police couldn’t find any bear. Everyone in town was freaking out, babies crying and everything, running to the station, and by the time they got there it had just gone back off into the wild.”

Bev buries an interested snort in her shawl, shaking her head. “That pretty much _confirms_ it’s bull, Mikey.”

“Maybe we could p-puh-put that in the movie, or something?!” comes Bill’s first positive comment of the day, lowering his camera to his shoulder and whirling on the spot to try and get a look at everyone’s expressions. “Like...Like the bear is what killed Bev’s character in the first place, and that’s why she’s a ghost-banshee-thing now...we could totally go looking for it, even if it’s only the one shot! Could be our pee-z duh resistance!” 

Ben’s shocked eyes practically pop out of his skull; Eddie’s voice comes from up above Richie’s head, always up above, “okay, going to the diner is fine, bear-hunting definitely isn’t. I like the sound of Mike’s,” with a spiky little lilt upwards at the end. This is familiar, too, this lift; Eddie’s most earnest sort of tone. Reserved for admitting his funny food preferences, like prawns and pickled onions, and for cheering his friends up, giving his friends sunshine. Richie is all of a sudden aware that he has been tipping sideways ever so slightly when Stan gives him a warning touch on the elbow. 

“Going home’s just - just boring though - and not even safe either!” Bill insists, wiggling his camera like it’s a dog treat and Eddie’s a hungry puppy. “Nuh uh, not with Bowers and his stupid fucking friends. Saw what’s been happening to Rich’s.”

Eddie blinks at Bill for a few more seconds before, with another puff of those sweet and pimply cheeks, focusing in on Richie again. Eyebrows curling in like a pair of geese as Richie shrinks into the gravel. Oh man. Of all the things he had dreamed so desperately for the last one hundred and sixty eight hours of telling to Eddie, admitting to Eddie, fluttery-eyelash hinting to Eddie, _this_ was absolutely not one of them. It’s not even like he hadn’t expected him to know already, ‘cause everybody knows, really, to the sad little point where Richie is almost at peace with it. Something to talk about at lunchtime, he’ll give them all that, something funny. He likes funny just as much as the next guy; would have laughed himself wheezy if it were just out of a movie or something. Would have laughed at his own reflection. And just ‘cause Richie wanted more than anything for boys like Eddie Kaspbrak not to laugh, to ever even hear half the punchline, didn’t mean he wouldn’t. 

“What, how do you mean?”

Fuck. _Fu-UUUUUU-ck._

There’s an awkward, thicker than spongecake silence for a moment, Bill scratching his neck in regret, as usually occurs with these things. Not in such a bad way. Richie’s friends love him, that’s for sure, even if Bowers’ friends can’t, and they always shyly have him know he can speak about these things - he just doesn’t, is all. “You know, like with the, um…” Richie struggles, coughing on the curve of a giggle and itching his bottom lip. “The, like, eggs and stuff. You probably heard, outside the window or something…”

Another silence - one that Stan coughs through. “No, I didn’t hear anything.”

“Oh, you didn’t?! It was super loud...super inconvenient actually, ‘cause it was pretty late and I was sleeping like a baby. My parents are in New Hampshire so I don’t have to stay up late helping my dad with his weird - um - computer games. You know, I was making the most. And also ‘cause I might even be allergic to eggs. Like at, one point when I was little it looked like I was actually allergic to eggs because I’d need to poop really bad and get all dizzy and weird after eating breakfast, but...turns out that was the only problem - that I’m weird. Still, kind of possibly dangerous for -”

Richie chokes on his own tongue as the thick, furry grey end of Eddie’s boom microphone comes swinging straight up for his jaw, falling back on his shoulder-blades with a squeak; Eddie’s eyes are all alight and his eyebrows raised up high from the other end of the pole. Again, electric. “Weirder than Hell,” he bristles, as Richie blows a whisk of hair off his specs and Stan leans over, snickering, to run his fingers through the fluffy boom-covering. Bill lets off a slightly despairing noise. “I’ll just come back to your place instead then.”

“My...my place? Like my house?!”

Eddie shrugs and, God, starts smiling. Starts smiling with all the heat of the west under his cheeks. “Yeah, what’s one more door down?! In case you have an allergic reaction or something or just, like, need someone to call the fucking police. Have you done that already?”

Richie’s only halfway through shaking his head before Eddie’s away again. “Of course you haven’t. Nobody ever does but then that only means it’ll happen a zillion more times - be cool to come round, again, anyways,” he says, voice dropping back down low into his slightly calmer, more tender tone, as, in a swooping movement that surely has to be a figment of Richie’s imagination, a hallucination from a little bit too much sunlight, holds his hand out. Just one, butterfly hand - mothballs and fruit salad - all for Richie to take.

Richie finds his voice, at last, even if it’s only a little croak, lost over where Bev, Mike and Ben are now bashing out their script rehearsal, even if it’s only a “yeah, you can come.” ‘Cause he knows how Eddie Kaspbrak’s hands smell, again, he knows they are hot and clammy; he knows how they feel laced between his very own. He lets Eddie pull him up and never felt less embarrassed in his life.

-

The walk back to his house comes close to breaking this, to being embarrassing, but the tall, happy Beverly also walking between the pair of them eases that just a little bit. “You know, if our horror-movie hits Hollywood, I’m thinking of changing my name,” she’s saying to Eddie from up on the leather of her bike. “Something French and ugly.” Her complex is just through the thin, orange-green slug of woods behind Richie’s. He told her a bunch of times she could cut through his backyard and speed the whole thing up by twenty, get a soda on the way, but all that ever got was a curly shake of the head, a roll up of her denim-sleeves to show him all the nasty bumps and lumps she’d already racked up from the bugs. Bev is so weird. All of Richie’s friends kind of are. And he thinks now that’s kind of what makes them such a gravity; had been that way for him since he was six years old, after all, when he found his very first friend in Ben Hanscom. They were both in the nurse’s office and they were both pretending with their top lips puffed not to cry. Ben said the great, yellow bruise on Richie’s belly that had landed him there in the first place was shaped like a giraffe, and that’s when the tears came. That’s when they knew each other. Richie was allowed to chum with all Ben’s other friends from then until forever.

It’s when Bev stretches up so high on that bicycle-seat in between Eddie and Richie’s houses and turns to give them both a bloody-fingered salute in goodbye, that Richie has got to learn all at once how to be brave on his own. He looks from Beverly’s shrinking, speeding little frame on the sky and then down to Eddie like he’s a butterfly on his finger. “Girls, huh?” He chances.

Eddie seems to wake up under his voice; shoulders stretching like a yoga-girl and eyes twinkling. “What about them?”

“They’re so goofy.” 

“Naw...no more than you are, at least.” 

They keep a weird, wobbly little gap between one another while sidling on through Richie’s doorway. He only remembers to pull his ‘after you!’ jerk of the hand halfway through shoving his own butt in immediately and freezes like a peeing dog with his leg in the air - “ _doesn’t Richie Tozier use his own bathroom?!_ ” - for a good ten seconds. Tonight will take a giggling, snorting sort of bravery. The kind where you don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re so scared but, hey, at least you can tool on it. At least you can see yourself for what you are and pretend not to be so distraught by that. 

His mom and dad being up riding ‘round on steam-trains in New Hampshire had been the only half-truth he’d told, earlier, and sure enough the place is totally still. The staircase is dusting purple as the sun prepares to sink outside, there’s leaves on the carpet. Richie almost pulls a muscle in his belly lunging for Eddie’s elbows and steering them like oars away from his wall-hung, fifth-grade school picture.

“Aye, but I wanna see!” Eddie’s saying, pink plots on his cheeks and chin. “I haven’t been here forever, don’t even...even know where to go pee. Wanna see what I’m missin’.”

Something about that hurts Richie a little bit, and it gets even sorer when he registers the dry, cool weight of Eddie’s arms still in his hands, but he throws his tongue out instead of knowing that. “Some things you just miss for a reason, Weasel.”

“Weasel. You definitely shouldn’t still call me Weasel.”

“You still look a lot like one…”

Eddie clucks his tongue like a lizard and gives up ever so slightly on the school picture for just a second. He tips that rosy chin up at the top of the staircase and the little snatch of bannister you can see from here, casts a glance over the skirting-boards, even takes a sniff. Like after your video-game character gets ducked down and you have to give it a little ‘ree-callie-brate’ time before you can start smacking at any buttons again. Richie watches him and can feel something throbbing very slowly behind his teeth; oh god, how near he is, just now. How real. Richie has dreamed about Eddie Kaspbrak so, terrifyingly hard for a boy he only shared two classes with. He wondered what his favorite song in the top forty was and which dance-moves he knew when he couldn’t fall asleep at night, swore he could do the MC hammer steps like a champ, and when he and his mom cried at the end of When Harry Met Sally at Christmas he’d cried for it to be all ‘bout him and Eddie. It was dangerous and creepy but it clung like a rash. 

Tracing the curve of Eddie’s nose, tart and tough as a cherry, against the cold of his own house’s radiator and not from the bleachers at school feels considerably less criminal. Richie admittedly doesn’t really feel like he exists at all right now, but he feels alright, and he’d say that’s not such a bad trade. When he flicks at Eddie’s chin and squawks at him, “what do you wanna try see first then?!”, those corny, Christmas-miracle movies never felt less far away. There’s a grin wider, cheekier than an Irish rainbow on Eddie’s face, one so full of light and ideas and good-nature it practically shakes on his skin, and Richie can almost hear bells. 

“Where to start, where to start…”

These bells are jingling louder and longer by the split-second, by the time they’ve made it up to Richie’s bedroom. His blinds are still low from his early morning sulking and his lamp, shaped like a rocket-ship, glows blue. Eddie doesn’t notice. He’s just as enthusiastic about this little catchup-sweep as his teeth glinting and eyes crinkling downstairs would have you think, maybe even a bit more; he kneels down low next to Richie, runs his thumbs over every Gameboy cartridge under the bed with his cheek squished into the carpet. “So you are still, like, a game-nerd and stuff?”

“Totally. S’why my eyes are square.”

Eddie gives him a corner-of-the-eye glance, the sheets up top spilling down the back of his head like a bridal veil. He giggles and Richie’s heart combs itself over. “Figures. I guess it’s good to have _something_. I know a bunch of people who don’t.” 

“How d’you mean?” Richie asks with his hand over his mouth. 

“Like, people who aren’t game-nerds but also aren't something-else-nerds instead,” he says, sleepily tugging forward a plastic crate of magazines and pizza flyers. “There’s a guy called Cody on my ice hockey team -”

“Cody Horton?!”

“- Yeah! Cody Horton, his shoulders slope so hard, right?! It’s so scary. But the scariest thing is that when he goes home from ice hockey, he doesn’t do shit. He doesn’t even like going to the movies. Whenever I ask him what he’s into he just gives me a list of _names_ , girls’ names.” 

Richie’s belly is going a little bit sweaty under his shirt, as Eddie digs into one of his mom’s old doctors’ surgery newsletters. He’s halfway through responding, “well...if you have girlfriends you have kind of made it -”, when he sees Eddie’s wrist smudge up over a large, green-gloss one printed big and bold, ‘what is wrong with my child’s brain?’ and practically soils himself. Richie can’t for the life of him remember ever piling that one in there with the rest of them but is still cursing himself for it with all the fire in Hell. “...Oh, that’s bullshit beyond bullshit, le’me tell you. Most of the boys in our grade who have girlfriends can keep them for a maximum of, like, five…” Eddie’s hands are whirling and his voice is interested and carried-away but the longer Richie stares with his mouth open like a spooked donkey, the further he fast-forwards to the crux of it. To Eddie inevitably catching that glance and shuffling back in anxiety and then following it for himself and then finally -

“Are you - oh…” 

His thumb dusts it. He’s reading letter by letter. Game over. 

Eddie looks at Richie’s face, and then back at the newsletter, and then he cracks a confused, stricken little smile, and then he drops it again. “ _What is wrong with my child’s brain…_ ” he reads along with his tongue very close to his teeth. “God, that’s...that’s so morbid. It’s from the doctor’s or something?”

Richie’s jaw is still idiotically hanging while he nods - he’s only really put back to normal speed when a bit of drool hits his lip. “Kind of. My - mom picked it up but she doesn’t think that, or anything…” he arches his back like a cat. It isn’t even such a funny topic but, again, had just been printed so, so low on his list of things he’d ever want to talk about with Eddie Kaspbrak for the first time in five years. His bad luck is outdoing itself. “It was just from when I was really little. So little. I think we still even hung out together, like, we’d still play Scotty-Dog together, that’s how little. She was talking to my doctor and they were just saying about how other doctors have been researching a ‘different type of brain’ or some kind of - like - mumbo jumbo. A different one where some easy things are randomly hard but then other things, like being a game-nerd, or...watching Looney Tunes as a kid or whatever...that’s so much -”

“Richie?”

The blood in his cheeks is puffing like pastry. Must be scarlet. “Uhuh?”

Eddie tucks the newsletter back into the crate, replacing its front-of-house spot with a copy of GoreZone from just beneath it - one with boggly-eyed baby Freddy Krueger glaring up at them both off the cover - and then shoving it out of sight altogether. He says while fidgeting it all into place, “I remember that stuff.”

Jeez. “Oh! - Fuck, sorry. Must’ve just bored your balls off.”

“It’s all good,” Eddie titters. He’s starting to move and dig a little bit again but his energy is very much still, heart of him still very much angled towards Richie. He kicks his leg out in an awkward, cramping Z-shape to touch at Richie’s foot with his own; an ‘it’s not a big deal but I still totally care’ that Richie can’t quite translate, yet, but feels all the love of regardless. He sits slumped and calm as a teddy-bear for a few seconds. “Nothing’s too boring when you got a voice as weird as yours. Sound like Elmer Fudd.”

“Ay-ay, I was having a moment.” 

“Bill should have cast you as his star.” By the time Eddie’s moved onto his next little prize, they’re both snorting into one another’s shoulders again like eleven years old. Yabbering ‘til their mouths get really dry, swatting at each other’s fingers. Eddie’s managed to steady his hands enough to work open the clasp on Richie’s box of cheesiest, cheapest practical effects goodies and the hilarity he finds in a roll of mummy-tape laying over the top of it all practically shakes the roof.

“Oh guh - oh god - what’s all the...why’s it all _stainy_?!” Eddie bleats with laughter, as Richie wraps a browny-cream piece of it ‘round his own forehead nice and tight. Makes the skin underneath turn magenta which only has Eddie squealing harder.

“It’s for effect - it’s very a-ancient Egypt -”

“It looks like _shitty toilet-paper_!” 

It’s definitely different, laughing at sixteen instead of eleven. Richie covers his mouth with the back of his thumb when he snickers, now, and he wipes it on the flat front of his t-shirt when Eddie isn’t looking; Eddie’s laugh is much deeper and looser and it sounds a lot like a cartoon character’s. They keep their faces turned half away from each other always. The way things should have gone tonight would be that it turned out, after all, they missed nothing. Richie and Eddie’s friendship would be a lunchbox time capsule and the lid’d come pelting off with one long, movie hug. But that isn’t really how it is. Growing up in a different universe to Eddie, one where there is no hockey-team nor banana yellow socks, there is nobody to change up from gym with, has cost Richie so much. Eddie shuffling forwards on his butt to take the wheel, taking the mummy-tape out of Richie’s hands and wrapping it all ‘round his jaw for him, makes all of that loss gape wider than ever. Not in a hurtful way, though, and that’s what’s so weird about it; it’s more in a way of drawing in something new. A ‘we are never going back, you know, but I think maybe we are going forward.’

Richie could get used to that. He could get used to Eddie coming and staying in his bedroom, like this, touching and marvelling over all his things, poking fun at him. When everything was weird and new and scary, Eddie Kaspbrak still making him - 

_SPLAT!_

The moment is broken. 

Eddie’s hands zip back away from Richie’s jaw so fast it surely must hurt him a little bit. A funny move - seems like maybe, for a moment, he’d thought the noise was someone cracking open the bedroom door or something. As if someone peeking their head around it and thus seeing him with his hands wrapping Richie Tozier up like a long-dead pharaoh might deem it something naughty. Richie knows it’s not the door, though. He knows there is nobody home but the two of them and that this isn’t half the problem. No, he knows it’s what’s out on his front lawn. 

“Jesus, fucking -” Eddie lets off a high, anxious giggle. “I thought we were going to-”

Richie shakes his head, little chaplet of his hair fuzzing out through two strips of tape over it. Almost like a spidey-sense, his hair, puffing and twirling like alarm bells. “Be quiet for a min.”

“What? Why?”

“That noise. I think it might be…”

_SPLAT! SPLAT! SPLAT!_

There’s a soft little clamour outside of Richie’s low-drawn blinds, this time, the source of the sound getting braver. The wheeze of his front, picket gate opening and a few squeaking scrapes - plastic cartons on the zips and dips of a leather jacket. It’s eggs. It’s Henry Bowers and his stupid, bored-shitless friends and all their mommas’ eggs.

Richie acts faster than a jack-rabbit, grabbing Eddie’s suspended wrist so clumsy he almost stops to apologise and ducking down onto his chest. “We need to get under the bed,” he lisps, smacking all his crates and blankets and stuffie bunnies out of the way with the back of his hand. They’re still bouncing off the skirts of his walls by the time his whole head’s under there, by the time they’re starting to chorus outside all in them with their throws, “Hey To-o-ozier?! Hey To-ozier, aren’t you gonna come and blow us a kiss?!” and his ears are going the colour of radishes. The wrist in his hand won’t budge, though. Eddie is sitting wide-eyed and upright as a dog on the New Year’s Eve Sky-Show and his eyes are trained on the window. You can see yolk drooling under where his blinds trail off.

“We really need to stay low! It’s them - it’s the - the eggs,” Richie tries again frantically, not even making it past the L of ‘low’ before Eddie’s already shaking his head like crazy. Somewhere between an old, disapproving grandmother and a stubborn little kid. Maddening. “Come on, Eds. We can call the cops afterwards, swear on my ma.” 

“I don’t wanna call the cops,” Eddie hisses. 

“What? What are you talking about?!”

“We need to go and talk to them - I wanna talk to them.” 

Richie is really losing faith in his own ears. The look on his face, hanging low from his gaping, gawking mouth, is hopeless. Eddie toughens his own and goes to start pulling himself up to his feet, dusting off his knees, before Richie throws himself flat into his lap like a damsel. Please God, please fucking lord, why _tonight?!_ Why’d he have to feel his own hair catch in Eddie’s belt-loops, feel his own cheek against where his skin’s all warm, feel his own next six month’s worth of dreaming find its feet like _this?!_ The otherwise tenderness of it all might be lost, just now, but if anything it keeps Eddie to the ground. Keeps them both totally silent and still for a beat. 

“I wanna see your big, ugly face, Tozier, don’t get shy on me! Are you in bed already?!” is what rings through it like a hideous, hellfired school bell. “Have you got any _dudes_ up in there with you?” 

Eddie’s hands find Richie’s shoulders too fast for any of this to be taken in, but it will alright. It’ll get him when he’s sleeping and it won’t let go. “Richie, listen to me,” he says seriously. His voice is very boyish and Richie thinks his breath would taste nutty - of course, this is what he thinks of, at times like this. “Can you get all your mummy shit back out? You know, all your spooky effects?”

Richie is so incredibly dazed at this point he starts nodding on instinct, before reversing himself. “I think I just want to sit and wait for…”

All of a sudden there’s a hand on his face. “Do you have any fake blood?”

“I…”

“Richie?!”

The touch, fruit salad and mothballs, and the rush and the anxiety of it all is practically sending Richie to sleep. His eyes are squinting and shuttering, his shoulders are quirking; it’s all such a fucking nightmare even his body’s giving him the ‘peace out!’. Eddie squeezes, squeezes up and forward so all the loose snatches of Richie’s skin between his fingers pinch. Squeezes a little bit of life back in him. “Give me the biggest, cheesiest tube you got. I’m gonna do something really funny.”

When Eddie’s finally working the situation into his hands, crate on his lap (Richie’s cue to peel himself off) and hair bugging out all crazy, the hubbub beyond Richie Tozier’s bedroom window has almost totally transformed. The egg-spatters grow thinner, higher-sounding - liquid on wood - and the scraping grows loud and deep. Not really scraping at all, at this point. It’s the wolf-whistles and hoots and snickers all in between Richie’s tuned into and, really, that might just be a blessing; if he properly focused with his eyes closed on anything else, he’d know it as climbing. He’d know it as farm-boots scuffling up the frame of his porch, half-drunk hands on the slats of the walls. He’d know Henry Bowers was scaling the front of his house like a werewolf. 

Eddie holding the nozzle of Richie’s ‘VAMPIRE SNOT’ bottle with his eyes glowing towards the tip of it makes him think of a witch at her cauldron. His eyebrows are knotted so tight in excitement it puts wrinkles on his forehead. Imp. “Now we gotta go to the window. Sa-teez-fac-shun, baby!” He whitters nervously. 

No response from Richie, duh. But Eddie’s made a little bit of peace with this; he whips the tube up high over his head and starts marching up on his own, throwing open the blinds like a maid, reaching for the latch and -

The next few moments are really something out of a movie. 

Eddie’s feet kicked behind him, neglected, chunky red food colouring bucketing from his hands like a fallen ice cream, a scuffle on wood and a shout of, “ _JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!_ ” The thread of Richie’s shorts has surely fused into the carpet, by now, half-crouched under the bed, but it’s all so vivid he can picture it better than anything. He’s right at the front-line of it. Henry clinging on by his grey, curly fingernails, so very ready for a scared-shitless Richie Tozier in a bathrobe, to throw an egg right clean against his stupid, stupid face. His cronies all bouncing on their chucks for the final, whooping celebration down below. The cracking of beer-cans and click of bikes. And, right when the grand prize is due, right before the ultimate shit-out, there’s Eddie Kaspbrak, strong and bloody and cackling like he really is from a horror movie. There is Richie Tozier’s old-new, last-first best friend. 

Richie thinks maybe Eddie is the toughest person he knows. 

He pushes his cheek up against the hitch of his shoulder, again, just like earlier. Thumb-wipes a dash of red over it for good measure. Eddie looks so interesting, like that, looks so bright and goofy and real, that Richie can’t even curse himself for yabbering, “can you sleep-over? Will - do you wanna sleep-over?” He can’t even hear the police sirens - the neighbours, probably, finally pulling their weight. 

No, all he can hear is Christmas-bells, and they all chime in to Eddie’s, “when have I ever said no?!” right back. Christmas-bells and cicadas; a funny kind of summer. One he is so, so ready for.


	2. Mountain Dew

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warnings for the chapter: mention of a small incident with a razor (pretending to shave) and of homophobic bullying.

Richie is ten years old and wondering whether he’s got really bad luck, or he’s just kind of a dumbass. 

He’s standing in front of his head-to-toe bedroom mirror with his t-shirt stripped back for the heat-wave, tummy shining, ceiling-fan putting a cowlick through his hair. The latter is the only one in his house still working and has turned his bedroom into a little bit of a ballroom, for the last week or so. Sometimes his mom’ll come put her butt down on his pillows just to sit and drink her sweet-tea, for a while, she’ll knock her knuckles on his windowsill and tug on all his dreamcatchers while she calls Gramma. “You can never let an old lady get hot, you know,” she’ll tell him with a smooth of that cowlick. One that’s kind of annoying but that has no reason to be, really, that is gentle but tickles like a spider. “We’re just not built for it, we go crazy and sweaty and start swooning on the sidewalks. Naw-t pretty. Besides, you like my company, don’t you?”

Richie will give her an unenthusiastic little grin. Gawk all his teeth out and tug his own lips down instead of up and robo-squeak through the grit of it, “yeah. You are so pleasant to hang out with,” ‘til Mom pushes his face away in a giggling fit. She wears bangles in the summer-time and they clink and sing with every twitch. 

“You stay grateful for the people who hang out with you, Richie Jude. Trust me on that one. Don’t you ever let them regret it, or wish they hung out with someone a little nicer, or they might...you know…”

And she’ll finish it all with half a lipstick-y bite of his nose. 

Just now, in the glare of his own mirror, Richie would call himself grateful, more than anything. He will only ever stand and stare at himself all bug-eyed like this if Eddie Kaspbrak from nextdoor (from FairyLand, more like it) is standing right behind him, you see, and sure enough, you can see the tanning, gripping tips of the boy’s fingers curving ‘round each shoulder. Whisk of dark hair just by his neck, the smell of pond. Eddie stands behind him in the coolest part of the room, like a puppet-show master, and plays noughts and crosses between his shoulder-blades. They are doing something truly important. They are playing dress-up. 

That’s kind of where his bad luck comes in, actually - Eddie’s hands come hawking away from his game and up to Richie’s face and, in one, swift ‘SNAP’, sealing a little plastic snout over his nose. Picked up fresh from the party-store ‘round the bend. “Surpr-i-i-i-se!” He sings like a choirboy. “I figured this time _I_ could be the explorer, like, dig up all the gold, and _you_ could be the sniffer-mole. The trustiest kinda sidekick.”

Richie wiggles the string with his tongue poking. “Y’know, you say that like it was different last time.”

“It was different. I was the Buccaneer, you don’t remember? We made a liquorice beard and everything.” 

“And I was still the fuckin’ mole!”

All this gets is a mysterious gale of laughter on Eddie’s part - sounds like bees, makes Richie’s waist and stomach jerk funny. He was a real bossy-boots, ten-year-old Eddie Kaspbrak, and he was always playing as something totally swashbuckling to flaunt it with. His characters all had jaws chiselled out of pink pop-rock and fuzz on their chins, great, flowing jackets down to their ankles made from precious jungle-wood-strip, and for the sake of the story, Richie always had to be whatever sort of sidekick fit around that. He was the brains, Eddie was the beauty, the brawn. It was starting to suck balls. 

His mom had catted at him, back when the fan in her room ran smoothly and she’d lounge about there, when it was Richie knocking on the door and having to slip his shoes off at it like a pup off a leash, that this was only fair. She said that a bunch of kids his age weren’t allowed to do much of the things they liked at home and should at least get a stab at it, in play-pretend. Eddie had counted as one of those. Richie’s mom’s advice is often wonky, though, come to think of it. She was a little strict and a little fierce-faced and sometimes it all came out so, insanely annoying - like when he’d asked her before school one time if his face was going to be this round and spuddy-looking forever, if it’d still be like that by next birthday, and she’d said, “forever and a day, Goosey. God made it that way.” 

But half of it, Richie would trust like magic. And this probably fell into that category, that Eddie deserved it, really; that Eddie deserved to find all the gold in the universe and that Richie was grateful that they could hang out, he was grateful to feel Eddie’s hands on his shoulders in the summer-time and somehow still manage to feel cool under them. So he hitches up his party-store snout with a thumb, gives it a squeeze, and tells his greatest friend of all, “alright, alright. I’ll be your sniffing-mole or, like, whatever you wanna call it. I can be it next time, too - and forever, I don’t mind.”

Eddie’s cheeks flush like orchids. Bingo. “Forever?! Oh shit, that’s awesome. We could live together when we’re older so that we could play this constantly.”

“Uhuh. Me and my wife could take downstairs, and you and yours could have the top.”

“You don’t have a wife, Richie, you’re a mole.” 

Richie rubs his own bare belly with the backs of his knuckles. He feels oddly like he’s saying something wrong. “No, like, for the real life part.”

Something in the lining of Eddie’s face falters, all of a sudden, and Richie’s suspicion is confirmed beyond belief. Like this is a television show and some idiot slacker boy at the studio leant his ass on all the tapes and now this one’s cut cold. Oh god, Richie really has said something wrong. He really should have let Eddie and his wife have the downstairs, now he thinks about it, he should have told him they could have a top of the line jacuzzi and a grand piano the colour of macaroni, too. The blankness all only lasts a few seconds, but he’ll regret it forever. He’ll be sorry forever. 

Instead of silence, now, Eddie lets off a sort of chirrup and keeps his eyes very clear. And when he says, “I gotcha. At least we can still play-pretend,” his voice is smaller than a mouse’s. “Just you and me.”

-

Summer school starts around two, hot days after Richie managed to have Eddie Kaspbrak sleep in his bedroom.

They’ve been the longest he’s ever known. 

Apparently waking up to the boy you failed every test for the last five years for daydreaming over’s heel swiping past your nose, his butt by your head and with your own dirty peejay pants hitched up over it, all at the crack of dawn, just really warps your sense of time for a while. They’d fallen asleep with the windows wide open and it made the room stink of bugs and heat. Fake blood was booger-drying into the windowsill. Eddie somehow made it all nice; he turned his face up to the slow breeze and whispered over his shoulder, “there’s no way you’re making me breakfast, Rich. I gotta go home,” while his silhouette looked like something off stained glass.

Richie stared at Eddie’s back where it faced him, just for a second, just in case his eyes’d pop out on his cheeks if he stared any longer. “You can make your…”

“Ch, ch,” Eddie had ticked out. He covered that back in the stripes he’d worn yesterday and turned his nose, gave Richie a little glow of his eyes. They looked a lot bigger when they were tired. Only other word he had to get out was, “Mom,” until the end of it, until he’d fluttered them away again, and he was off out the door like a fever dream. 

Silence. A clunk of the front door. Richie had gone to pull his bedspread up over his head, push his open mouth right into it and take the entire last twenty-four hours in at last - until realizing said bedspread was Garfield-print, and groaning so ferociously his calendar fell off the wall. 

The next two days had been rammed with that; groaning, cringing. Had crept up on him like something halfway between a fever and some awful, ancient curse, got him scrubbing in the shower and got him in front of the TV too. Richie could barely get in a mouthful of sandwich for lunch without remembering himself face-planting right in Eddie’s lap or hogging the covers in his sleep, soon as his teeth hit the tuna. The worst it ever got him was Mom and Dad’s great blustering return, the night before summer school. Mom had her shades on - first sign of trouble - and was all laden with little lumberjack gift-store bags. When Richie came in with his tail between his legs to help peel them off her, maybe line her new ‘White Mountains; wish you were here!’ magnets up on the fridge so she could sit down, all he got was a shrug backwards. 

“Oh,” she’d sniffed. “You’re here. They let you out of jail early, then.”

The pair of them had naturally heard about the police-sirens all wailing outside of their house, just nights before, and were batshit-bananas about it. Whole, flashing show of it had probably been entertainment enough for a lifetime. Richie tried to call their hotel a few hours after Eddie left. He’d nibbled his thumb to a pulp through a pre-recorded, “sorry, the line you called is busy. You should call back later,” lecture, but Jeanie from three doors down had got there before him. Probably told enough to let Mom know the place was fine, but enough for a few healthy curls of smoke coming out of her ears - _Oh yeah, it’s lookin’ lovely over there, Maggie, it’s all good, I saw that boy of yours just fine this morning in the yard - fine enough to smoke a cigarette, too, it looked like!_

“I just...I just don’t get what you’d even _do_ to get that kind of bad attention!” she’d banshee-rattled back at home, throwing a mug shaped and coloured like a moose up into the cabinet. “You can be silly, I’ll give you that, and you can be clumsy. But _cops_ at our house?”

Richie was forming himself a mantra and it was proving to be really quite unsuccessful. “I didn’t do anything, Ma. I was out with Bill and Stan and all the rest, and then I came home. It was just a bunch of thugs on our sidewalk.”

“That’s a lying voice if I ever heard one.” 

In all fairness, it really wasn’t a lying voice. It was a lie, sure, but Richie wanted so, so achingly for it not to be that it was just starting to roll off his tongue like pancake syrup. He was busting his ass over this. Technically he didn’t have to; it’s not like the truth was all that incriminating, either. Mom knew he’d had some trouble with those kinds of boys, before, that nothing at school was really easing it up - she’d practically broken down Principal Nisbet’s office-door just at the start of this year, demanding, _”YOU TREAT MY KID LIKE HE’S A HUMAN BEING AND MAYBE I WON’T MAKE ANY PHONE-CALLS, GAW-T IT?!”_ \- and that they’d do this kind of thing to him if they felt vicious enough. But something about it felt really, weirdly dirty, this time. Something about being razzed on by kids who think you like having boys in your bedroom, while you _were_ actually fawning over a boy up in your bedroom, that felt supremely wrong. 

‘Cause Dad would only ask him, “why would they say that in this first place, Rich?” and then Mom would ask afterwards, “and how’d Eddie end up there too?”, and Richie would drop dead on his own, living-room carpet with the panic of it all. Heart attack. So he’d kept his mantra - no Bowers, no Eddie. 

Safest plan for now. 

On the way to summer school, when it’s Stanley Uris firing the questions and not a totally seething pair of parents, when their voices slap against the sidewalks, it’s all a totally different story. 8 o’clock in the morning. They meet at the tip-top of pharmacy hill and trot the rest of the way together like a pair of gawky deer. Stan’ll usually have scored an almost-flat bottle of ginger ale from his parents, on normal days, if they’re just hanging out or heading to help Bill film something, but today his arms swing at his sides all in time with the breeze. This is a blessing - he will need all the muscle he’s got for the Richie-Tozier-cannonball flaming up on the horizon. 

Yeah, it’s coming and it’s fiery as Hell. Richie grabs him by the wrists like a chimp straight off the bat and squeals all in one breath, “Eddie threw _blood_ all over Henry Bowers the other day - he threw my fake blood - and Henry was trying to climb in my window and Eddie laughed at him and then he slept over and the cops came and put their sirens on and now my mom really wants to kill me - !”

The “ _what_?!” this all draws out of Stanley is so shocked and so slurried that Richie can’t respond to it for a good five minutes more - he’s cackling too hard. 

They’ve made it all the way to the foot of the school’s front steps before Richie can really get a word in sideways; Stan, mystified, is having to hold him up around the elbows to keep his giggles off the concrete and the strap of his backpack’s slipping all the way down to his wrist. “You’re corky, you’re crazy,” he’s kept saying all the way there. “I don’t know what story you’re telling but I really know it’s crazy.” 

When he finally gets a, “two - two nights ago…” croaking over the whine of the school-bell, he can scarcely believe his luck. And once it starts, it doesn’t stop for at least fifteen, hand-whirling minutes. Mummy-tape, magazines, blood and sleepovers. The works. 

“You...Henry was _arrested_? Like, real-shit arrested?!” Is Stan’s very first remark. Barely had enough silence to breathe in up until this point and his face is jerking around all strange, twitching from a smile to a strain - he’s formulating. Trying to work out how on God’s green earth you process the half of what’s just been prattled at him. His mouth has slid a little bit halfway down his chin, though - first sign the emotion he’s settled on is completely mind-blown. Richie is practically shaking with excitement. 

“I don’t even know!” He chirps at the speed of light. “I just know the cops came and that when we stopped hiding and stuff, looked out the window, they’d scrammed. Eddie said Henry looked like a total serial killer with all that shit over him.”

Those pursed, shocked lips finally start to curve into a snort, resting on that and then on a chuckle instead. Give it twenty seconds before he’s on the ground in stitches. “Oh god, he must’ve been _so_ mad…” he peeps out around the force of this. “Eddie, huh?! Who’d have thought that...Eddie!”

The pair of them are all in ‘n’ out of laughter long enough to make everybody within earshot miserable, although that’s not so hard in the middle of summer school. Isn’t enough people for air con to be taken so seriously and the only songs on the gym hall radio are from action movie soundtracks. As if it all wasn’t horrendously awkward enough. There’s six of ‘em today - Richie, Stan, three girls from their class (who had skipped so often that Richie only just now learned their names) and a quietly glowering boy from the grade below, all in stinging, yellow kit - and most of them probably find it kind of funny that a kid like Stan turned out to be part of the lineup. Even Bev and the rest find this funny. He plays a bunch of baseball, like, for fun, even plays it on the weekends; his dad bought him a shirt for his fourteenth birthday that’s meant to look like Red Sox uniform but says S. URIS in great big letters on the back. Stan’s really near the brightest in _every_ gym class. 

It’s only Richie that knows the salt of it; that Stan mostly only ever slips up ‘cause he’s talking to Richie all the way through it, back where the bleachers go shady. Double-teaching him every pass, putting him on every team just so he’s not the last one standing and taking all the blame when Richie inevitably brings said team crashing down. Yeah, that’s the truth. That’s why Stanley is bad at the things he loves. ‘Cause Richie Tozier crushed them under the stamp of both stupid, stinking feet. 

“I mean, it’s hardly really a chore - doing all this,” Stan tries to reassure, midway through some mindless, back-and-forth basketball drill. He always reassures, even on days as happy as today, and Richie can’t work out what that means. “Better than sitting at home, or proof-reading any of Bill’s stuff...you hear about that?”

Richie snickers through the chips of his front teeth. “Yeah...why’s he gotta keep changing the story, like, every five minutes?! There’s gonna be so many new characters by the end of it we’ll ‘ave to ask _these guys_ to help us out.”

“Uhuh, fucking artists. You’ll probably like his new plot though.” He does this weird little spin-lift that has the ball bounce under his leg a couple times, before it comes popping back up. One that if Richie tried to replicate he’d probably never be able to use both hips the same after again. 

“Oh yeah?” 

Stan nods, and then winks at him like a cat. “Sure of it. It’s a _love-story_.” 

And Richie has never, ever felt his skin squirl and his belly reel all to the same, tsunami-tune at once until this moment. 

It doesn’t go away after the bell’s whining again, and they’re all pattering out into the sunshine still wearing their kits and yabbering about tonight’s plans, ‘bout how stupid and tool-worthy coach’s new haircut is; it’s still raging at the bottom of his throat when they’re playing high-low-piccolo at the corner store and the clerk’s ringing up their Mountain Dew. They slug down a whole bottle together all stretched out on the pavement outside - ripe, bright yellow on stone - and Richie thinks of all the things that Stan might have been getting at. Love-stories were private, for him. He takes his Mom’s tapes of them like he’s taking crown-jewels from museum glass, and when he puts them on his TV set he pulls the sheets over half his eyes. Just to keep it a secret even from himself. And since Stan had crooned this one at him over stupid, stupid basketball, that all becomes impossible in a heartbeart. 

There’s Mountain Dew up his nose from drinking it laying down and he can’t open his eyes ‘cause the sun’s too bright and, all of a sudden, it’s last Christmas again. He’s in the back of the movie theatre for the very last, closing-scene kiss. It’s Eddie Kaspbrak’s face on the screen, this year, Eddie’s puckering lips and his own, crooked fingernails dipping against each cheek. Everyone’s throwing their popcorn but the music’s only just getting to its swell, and they’re only just leaning in, and, and, and -

Richie feels like pouring his fizz all over his face. 

Of course, when Stan pokes his rib with a snort, trying to get his attention, it just totally _has_ to be for the couple sucking face just over the other side of the road. One of the high-school girls is sat in a pretzel shape on her boyfriend’s lap, braids coming loose where said boyfriend takes them for his own clumsy grip. Stan puts his thumb up over in front of him like he’s squashing them when their lips meet. But, goofy as it sounds, this glimpse is almost completely what brings Richie out of his rut.

“What if I just, like, went over and... “ he makes a little claw with his hand to walk Richie through it. “Just, squirted soda all over ‘em? What do you think they would do?”

Richie pushes himself up onto his elbows, chin squashing, cheeks steaming. “You wouldn’t get halfway, good-boy!”

“I’m _not_ a good-boy.”

“Are too, just ask my mom.”

Stan rolls on his own elbow, giving Richie a bookish sort of look. He looks at most things like this, like he’s got a research paper on it due tomorrow's first period, and often draws a lot from it too. When Richie was small and could barely get up his own doorstep without his ankles zoinking, landing a scrape on his knee, it used to scare the Hell out of him. He’d come to school with cheeks a little swollen and his book bag over his belly and Stan would need only six seconds of it all to tell him, “they give out free band-aids at the office.” 

Just now it’s not really faring him so good. He pushes his hair off his eyebrows and says, “I can’t work out where the joke on that one is, Richie.”

“Probably ‘cause it’s not a joke, huh?! Had a total mouthful of it, all day yesterday.” Richie tugs that curl right out of Stanley’s fingers and plops it back where it started to tease. “Lucky I’ve got a good-boy buddy to my name, I’m telling. If she calls you later can you please tell her we all hung out the other day?! Maybe throw in, like, a, ‘oh, Richie seemed so tired and quiet, I really can’t picture any cops wanting to -”

His lips stop moving before his tongue does, when Stan’s eyes go wide and weird-looking. The energy between them has fallen flat. Richie can’t tell whether it’s real or it’s a signal ‘til a huge, cold shadow comes frosting everything dark blue, and he’s whipping his head over his shoulder not only to hiccups for moving too fast but, sure enough, to the sight of a real, scrunch-faced cop standing over them. The top button of his uniform is open and there’s sunburn and chest hair creeping through. His name tag reads ‘SPINK’. “Oh…uh…”

“What are you two boys doing out in this heat?” comes his green-sounding voice. 

Stan scrambles to sit up and hug his knees to his chest, but then the Mountain Dew’s sloshing right over, and then he’s scrambling to stamp out the fizz and his, “hi officer! We’re just - we’ve got summer school, officer, just cooling down after summer school!” comes out so strained you can barely hear the half of it. 

Officer Spink holds a beaten hand up and pops open another button. Richie has to manually wipe the grimace off his face. “Yeah, yeah. Take it back home for now, would you? We’ve had some troubles with, you know...wild animal control, those sorts of things. Hate for anything vicious to come along and keep you away from that summer-school.”

“What, like - the grizzly bear? Did it come back out?”

“Take it back home, you hear me?”

There’s an awkward little freeze. The officer keeps his thumb and forefinger on the gleaming, brown button, seemingly waiting for the boys to move along first - although they are both gum-stuck to the ground in fear. All three staring at each other like some horribly awkward cowboy stand-off. Funnily enough, though, Spink’s the first to leave - gives this strange little cock of the finger in substitute for a wave and then he’s disappearing off into the 7/11 right behind them. Bored stiff of his own orders. And for the second time today, barely even half close to the last, Richie and Stan are both laughing into their knuckles so hard that both boys’ eyesight will go purple-blotchy. For the second time today, everything so scary in Richie Tozier’s life is merely just a wicked punch-line. 

-

They don’t go home, that’s for sure. At least not for good. 

Stan’s stuck downstairs for the hurried little pre-dinner hour they spend at Richie’s. Both came in stumbling and stinking like sugar and Mom had been so happy to see a kid she could fuss and gush over that she’d practically keeled. “Tell her I’m great! Tell her I’m really great!” was Richie’s final, lip-synced little request, as he was chivvied out of the kitchen (“Oh god - Goose, I’m not even _looking_ at you ‘til you take a shower. You stink like Grandpa.”). Stan was tucked in at the dining table good and proper, at that point. Already halfway through a kitty-dish of goldfish crackers. And all he gave in response to this dying wish was a look close to terror but, somehow, Richie knew he’d grant it better than a pixie. 

The movie-theatre - that’s what they’re here cooling off all in time for. Apparently Bill had found a spare moment ‘round telling his brand new love story over the phone this morning to also invite Stan out, and to tell him to ‘come with an open mind’; “it’s, like, inspiration or something,” Stan had muttered while they walked up the driveway. “That’s why he wants ‘the whole crew’.”

“The whole crew as in…?”

“You know. Us. Mike, Bev, Ben - and Eddie.” 

Richie could have sworn Stan’s voice had lilted a little funny, on that last, all-churning name. He could have sworn he was being teased. Even the arc of Eddie’s front door just next to him seemed warped and sick-joke-y. It wasn’t true, obviously, but he slumped under it all the same. Slapping ‘Cooling Coconut - Scents for The Summer!’ through his hair in the dark green of his own shower, just now, Richie’s almost shrinking into the tiles. It’s almost like someone’s wedged their finger through the door just to point at him and laugh. 

He stares at all his dad’s purple-grip razors. The glow of the soap ‘round his nose, clinging to the jewels of his eyelashes, makes it look like there’s another hand curving just over the top of them. Richie can remember playing with them when he was eight with his own hip all strudel-tied up to Eddie Kaspbrak’s. He’d stood with one foot in the shower, just in case Dad himself came knocking and he’d need to whip them straight back where he found them. Eddie kept his butt over the door-handle like a guard dog, though, and he put his fingers in his ears when Richie started talking too loud. 

(“ _Why can’t I just grow u-u-up?!_ ” 

“Ay-ay, Richie, you sound like an elephant! You’re gonna grow up really soon!”

“Am not. Even my Mom’s doc said so - _I’m gonna be_ eight years old _forever_!”) 

Richie copies out his own memory as he dreams it - hitches his sixteen-year-old elbow up in tribute to his tinier one, a ghost of himself. He’d taken that easy shave razor and flunked it right over his forehead after he’d finished whining. The most grownup thing he could think of, shaving in front of the bathroom mirror, in the dumbest way you could possibly do it. All he’d gotten was a little nick and a few hairs of his left eyebrow missing but that’s not what he thinks of right now. Richie thinks of Eddie fixing it later, the best way an elementary-school kid could; how he’d kissed the end of his own thumb and then touched Richie’s brow with it like a healer. _It’s a magic kiss, I read about it. My mom’s into band-aids and medicine but...I just like a magic kiss._

Eddie healed Richie a lot, really. Those kisses were more powerful than he knew. 

When Stan is finally free from Mom’s frenzy and Richie’s out dry in his only clean clothes left - some odd-looking basketball tank thing, much to his agony, and a button-up to hide all offensive parts - the sun is starting to set. The air’s already thick and smelling of popcorn before they’re anywhere near those Capitol lights. 

Richie can’t tell whether Eddie’s being here now makes meeting with his friends so much more exciting, makes the whole thing better, or so much more anxiety-inducing. Can’t tell whether he’s blessed or he’s cursed. He just knows whatever reason his body’s got for pulling all this weird shit on him, it’s painful. Painful enough for the doctor’s office, tonight - Eddie’s lounging on the bollards just outside, when they’re coming up to the theatre’s front. He and Bev are on their backs, curved over the round parts like a pair of stray cats. And the only way Richie can respond to any of this is just by letting off a weird sort of burp. 

For the first, luckiest time all day, Stan seems completely clueless. He gives Richie a little duck over the rib with the back of his hand, giggling, “all that Dew, huh?!”

Richie, who is usually very interested in jokes about burps, can barely hear his own laughter over the whir of his ears. If he could he’d say it sounded more like a whimper. Bev’s the first to sit up and wave like a bride, and this gives him just a little bit more time; starts making a bird-call with her free hand. “A-wooh - it’s the _film crew_!” Comes her hoot just out the other end of it. 

“What’s up, Bev?” Stan leads. “How you guys doing?”

“As open-minded as ever. You get that fuckin’ memo? About the Bawling Bride and Cedric?”

Eddie’s knees hanging over the side are speckled, like he’s been sitting down on something wobbly. Something like gravel or just really awful carpet. They’re swinging all as gently as the sea - he’s about to sit up. The world’s about to shake. “Who’s that again?” 

“You know, Stan. The main characters of our movie.”

Those knees finish with one final, gymnast’s kick as Bev and Stan fall off into tittering conversation, hands flitting like a cat’s paws and, finally, face appearing ‘round Bev’s shoulder so glowing and freckly it hurts to look at. Eddie’s wearing a shirt that looks like something Richie’s grandpa would probably like, it’s dark brown and corduroy and some of the gaps between his buttons show a bit of his belly. His hair’s a little fuzzy. Looking him in the eye is so far beyond too much to think about but staring at his lap is no easier, for Richie, when all he finds there is his own, crumpled pyjama pants twisted ‘round Eddie’s fingers. Kept all neat and clean for him. 

“We meet again - some sunny day, huh?!” Comes his ripple of a voice - as if it hasn’t been heard in years, somehow, but has been in the breeze since forever at the same time. The pants are thrown like a classroom airplane and land at Richie’s sneakers. “Can finally get ridda these. Been clogging my bedroom floor for _two_ days, now.” 

“Hi - ! Hi, you got my…”

“Pants, yeah. I was gonna leave them on your doorstep but Mom was saying she thinks you’re gonna be locked in your bedroom like, forever. Apparently you’re the talk of the block. So I thought if it was Maggie answering the door to those she might be kinda, you know, weirded out...”

Richie’s fingers have never gone so sweaty, so thin-skinned, under the fleece of his own pyjamas ‘til now, peeling them up off the slabs of the Capitol patio. He lends his clothes to a lot of people, come to think of it; jackets went to Bev in the cold, swim-trunks to Mike in the lake. Ben took his loose sweaters as little cushions on every stretch of grass they ate on and Bill his flip-flops, to dash out to the backyard, sneak a cigarette while Mom went to pee. Couldn’t really tell, each time, whether it made him feel bad, or kind of useful. Whether it’s pride when Stanley goes, _“oh perfect, oh, ace!”_ all slipped up into Richie’s coolest, curviest flares, or shame he feels too stupid in them himself to have ever worn them to school. But, now, there couldn’t be less room to think about any of that. None left for worrying or doubting or being a big baby, none left for gaudy, yellow flares; barely enough for really registering these pants as his own.

No, that doesn’t matter anymore - they’ve strewn over Eddie Kaspbrak’s bedroom carpet like spilt lemonade and, in that, are never going to be the same. Looped over a laundry-chair, hung up dry and cool inside his closet. Richie feels like he’s holding a little chunk of Turin shroud. 

When he looks up, again, his eyesight is blipping in the heat. Eddie’s cheeks and nose are purple-green for a second. And his own voice, whirring like a computer, comes out with nothing but one, spat-out, “fucker.”

“What?!”

“You heard me, fucker! I’m gonna be grounded for life, you know, ‘cause you’re some kind of blood-obsessive. Some kind of - tiny, freaky little vampire.” 

Richie can feel Stan and Bev looking at him, he can feel their eyes pooling out wide and giggly as if he’s just fed ‘em pop-rocks. A little L-shape patch of pink burns into his cheek, right where he feels their watch; this whole thing could have been swept up, dealt with so much cleaner, if there weren’t a whole movie crew peeking in on the lot of it. Richie could have hoped to someday live this down. Stan and Bev’s interest is really nothing compared to what Eddie gives him, though, it never could have been. Said tiny, freaky little vampire finally sits himself up pert and proper, just so he can look at Richie square at the face. Just so he can give him the greatest, most cartoon-y looking grin you’d have ever seen in your _life_. 

“You and Bowers both, Rich!” His snicker comes ripping through the air. “You and Bowers both. You’re lucky you _do_ have a vampire sidekick, now, cops’ll probably be keeping major eyes on him. My handiwork.”

This has Richie swaying like a drunk. “Rather have a fairy godmother.”

“Ah, same thing!”

Bev finally makes her leap - she pokes her head towards them with her neck bent like a goose, face all lit up and cheeky. Something sort of funny about how she’s moving. As if the air ‘round where Richie and Eddie stand spitting at each other is somehow a little bit more fragile, as if she’s being careful. “Definitely lucky, as Hell,” she says. “Y’know, I would have killed to see that stuff. I would have taken a Polaroid picture.”

Richie looks from her to Eddie, bottom lip caught between his teeth from where he’s chewed it sticky, and gets his answer in a heartbeat; of course, Eddie had told Bev the second she got here. He tilts that grinning, walnut head at him with all that pride he’d had as a kid so strong. All that pride so magic. “Well, I can do it again,” he tells her, voice softening back down. “But, like, only if Bowers and his friends go on another rampage. I kind of doubt they will.”

“Wouldn’t be so sure,” Beverly cats back, shrugging. Ben, Mike and Bill have just streamed around the corner in a duck-row on their bikes but she’s too wide-eyed to notice.

“Really?”

“Really. He’s totally crazy like that, always tooling on somebody. Especially when it comes to stuff like…well, like, sort of…” 

Her fumbling is cut off by the three news entrances just to their left. Bill’s clamouring so hard, so excited, his bike’s hit the concrete with an unhealthy-sounding twang and he’s unzipping his backpack before he’s even detangled his legs from it properly. Mike’s jamming a wad of liquorice in his breast-pocket, finding his place next to Stanley, and Ben’s picking said neglected bike back up as Bill comes hurtling. “You guys w-waiting for the world to end before we go get our seats, or - ?!” He calls over Bev’s stammers. 

Eddie rocks forward so far he almost comes tumbling. “Nah, it’s packing up really tight in there. Didn’t wanna get split, you know, miss your running commentary.” 

This practically has Bill swoon on the spot. He pauses with his gaping backpack suspended just over his heart, mouth hanging ‘round, “oh my god, _opening night_!” as a pair of _Hellblazer_ comics come flitting down out of it and landing at his feet. Bev makes to rake them up, for him, but she can’t even get the snag of her shorts past the brick before Bill’s spotted them too and is flailing on lanky, over-excited legs. By the time he’s picked those up, five more classic prints of ‘em are slipping out and into his arms like babies; _Tomb of Dracula, Creepy, Tales From The Crypt, Swamp Thing_. “Jeez, Billy, we said bring snacks, not a public library,” Mike giggles, gentle and bemused and ultimately unheard - Bill’s next pre-occupation is palming a copy off into everyone’s hands. 

“Homework,” he teases, keeping the very first _Hellblazer_ for himself, close to his chest. “After the picture tonight, we gotta keep the spirit alive, right?! I bought literally everything I have - there’s more in the bag if anyone wants doubles.”

There’s a collective little _swish_ from all seven of them, peeking through whatever cheesy deal Bill’s given them. A couple of older kids come barging through the circle. “I didn’t think we had any swamp-monsters in the movie…”

“That’s the thing. I totally wanted to add one!” 

Richie crosses his eyes over his own _Tomb of Dracula_ , thumb squashed into the cartoon’s two, dripping fangs. It’s still got the downtown bookstore sticker on the top left corner. He can only make it around ten seconds before stupid, clingy curiosity is getting the better of him, before he’s suddenly wanting to know more than anything he ever knew in his life which pulp-papered villain Eddie Kaspbrak has in his hands, of course. And when he bucks at the knees in submission to this, said Eddie Kaspbrak is already waiting for him. Barest little twitch of his head to the left and he is met with yet another huge, plasma-drooling vampire, under an inch back from his nose. Richie’s heels bumble over each other as he jumps backwards and the comic-books slides down out of the way of an overjoyed Eddie. 

“Oh - you guys got the same!” Bill’s whistling, pointing at where Richie stands stiff. “Well, different issues, or, whatever...but still! You could work on a new plot together.”

“Write a - a whole new one?”

“Yeah, together. Only if you thought of something.”

Richie, who has been too shy to even put his name underneath Eddie’s on the last five years’ worth of school signup sheets, is fast short-circuiting. He should be brave enough for this sort of thing now, really. Already on this fuck-ass ‘movie crew’ together, already sharing Garfield bedcovers and pyjama pants and meeting up outside the theatre. His world has seesawed into one where being who he is and, within that, still existing in Eddie’s vicinity, is natural and okay almost totally overnight. And even so, nothing like this could ever be half as scary as back in fall; the day both Stanley Uris and Cody Horton, Richie and Eddie’s go-to gym partners respectively, had been off sick with a winter bug for the first day of their _wrestling_ unit. Nothing could be half as scary as hearing the words, _hey, Eddie, Richie Tozier’s all on his own out there - you go and show him how to leg-lock_ , at 9 in the morning. 

When he looks back up at Eddie and sees he is winking at him like a cat, he is more than given a run for his money. The huge, old town clock just a few buildings ahead, up in the heart of downtown, is ringing for seven o ‘clock and all of his friends are trying to scramble their papers and candies and coins down into their pockets, trying to finally make it through those sliding doors around that opening night rush, and for Richie time is totally still. Eddie gives him a funny little bump of the hip as they’re padding along. “You wanna sit next to me, Moody?” he asks him, in a voice like dreaming. 

Richie itches his shoulders through the force of it all, pushes himself through Eddie’s glow, and lets his head spin. He’s figured out that at this rate he is really going to die, this summer. Someone up above the sun is gonna have him keel over and die. And when the stench of Coca Cola and night-time hits him, the sound of tickets stripping out like dynamite, he’s at peace with that. “Sure,” he says, really, properly at peace. “You can cry on me when you get scared.”

“If your snoring couldn’t scare me, I actually don’t think anything can.”

“Only ‘cause you had ammo right back - yuhuh, I smelled those, you know.” 

They end up split apart, in that purple-draped screen room. All too packed and sticky and all the date-night couples were too loved up to budge -  
(“Excuse me…’scuse me, could my friend…” Ben had tried five separate times to the same high-school boy and girl, who gave him nothing in response to each but their own, slobbering kisses.)  
\- and they’d ended up all drip-and-drabbed across three different rows. Richie barely even really thought on it, though. He ended up between Mike and Beverly and, sure enough, by the time every last house-light had gone down, felt a steady little game of noughts and crosses all drawn into his back. Peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh boy, i have really lost my confidence with my writing just recently i really apologise!!!!!! i am hoping it picks up a little bit for later chapters as im really in love with this story and want to do it justice. :D

**Author's Note:**

> too shy to turn on anon commenting just yet but once i get into the swing of this ill enable it so hold that thought!!!!!! also im writing a couple chapters ahead so that i can update regularly (im hoping roughly every other week) but if i ever take a little bit i probably just got some writer's block


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